Cyberdrama in the Twenty-First Century

The finest writing on what some call the current communications revolution more often than not has emerged from the keyboards of scholars who combine training in the humanities with mastery of computers and cyberculture. Janet Murray fits this description as well as anyone, and her Hamlet on the Holodeck is the product of the creative interaction of both aspects of her thinking self. In addition to being a scholar of Victorian literature adept at drawing upon modern literary and cultural theory, she is also Director of the Program in Advanced Interactive Narrative Technology and Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT. Her outstanding book, which Library Journal named one of two “best computer books” of 1997, is at once a primer for the uninitiated, a historically and technically informed analysis of recent developments in electronically enabled storytelling, and a visionary prediction of how we may experience narrative in the more fully digitized future.

Murray begins with Captain Kathryn Janeway, starship captain in the Star Trek: Voyager series, interacting with the Victorian characters who inhabit her holonovel in the virtual reality of her ship’s holodeck. The episode “marks a milestone in this virtual literature of the twenty-fourth century as the first holodeck story to look more like a nineteenth-century novel than an arcade shoot-‘em-up” (16); the latter form has been the preference of stories run by most male crew members. Janeway’s attraction to her story’s brooding romantic hero becomes “an exercise posing psychological and moral questions for her” (16), and the episode thus stands as Murray’s representative anecdote for the artistic and educational potential of the kinds of narrative experience that will soon be available as technology progresses. Murray acknowledges the dystopic potentials of technological advance, conceding, for example, that “the violent gaming culture that now characterizes much of cyberspace is likely to spread as the Internet gains speed and bandwidth” (283). But, as her title suggests, she views our rapidly evolving communications technology as more liberating than dehumanizing, indeed as the opening of vast new artistic possibilities continuous with the great tradition of storytelling stretching from ancient epic poetry, through Renaissance drama and the Victorian novel, to modern cinema.

Murray sees a number of innovations that feed a desire for audience participation as harbingers of the holodeck. The shape of future literature is foreshadowed by the multiform story, “the narrative that presents a single situation or plotline in multiple versions, versions that would be mutually exclusive in our ordinary experience” (30). Multiform short stories such as Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” and Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” and multiform films such as It’s a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day express the modern “perception of life as composed of parallel possibilities” (37). This kind of narrative demands that the reader or audience assume a more active role, a development that Murray sees paralleled in the participatory dynamics of fan culture, most fully in the live-action role-playing (LARP) games in which fans of fantasy literature “assume the roles of characters in the original stories to make up new characters within the same fictional universe” (42). Three-dimensional movies produce a similar urge for audience participation, since the compelling illusion of being in a space awakens instincts to explore it. Amusement park attractions that allow one to “ride the movies” combine a visceral experience with gratifications of our need for story. Computer games are evolving from early versions consisting of simple-minded combat sequences and puzzles toward more narrativized versions featuring dramatic moments, immersive use of sound, and a cinematic point of view. The participatory demands of hypertext fiction reveal that burgeoning genre’s connection to these other forms of participatory storytelling.

All these phenomena are prominent in the critical discourse on postmodern culture. Murray’s contribution is to stress that they are related manifestations of a drive to merge performed and written narrative traditions with the rapidly expanding digital environment. Since participation is central...